Embraced and Extended...Long before the infamous Halloween Document, Microsoft was known for stealing the ideas of others. Yes, stealing. Even in 1991, in North West Indiana, the geeks of the time knew that Bill Gates hadn't had an original idea in his life. We were not so far removed from CP/M that we couldn't see the origins of DOS. DOS itself inspired a wide range of companies to build and release tools to make it suck less. PC Tools provided a menu-style file manager, which was unsuccessfully copied in DOS 4. Norton was famous for Speed Disk, which was copied by Microsoft as defrag. Let us never forget that Microsoft stole Stacker and called it dblspace. The list goes on, but only one is of personal importance to me... In 1991, there was no way to remove a directory tree. The rmdir command would not remove a directory that contained files, and del(ete) didn't have a flag for recursing subdirectories. It was a fact of life we all dealt with, and usually fairly easily as most programs were not very organized in their installations and rarely created more than a single directory in which to place files. I lived with this limitation as well, until I downloaded a shareware accounting system one night from a Fidonet BBS. That program created a directory for every month in the year, and within each of those several more directories were created, and in these empty database files were placed. I do not know how many directories were created, I only know that my frustration reached a point where its only outlet could be creativity. Thus was born NUKE. It took less time to write this utility than it would have taken to delete the monstrous directory structure that piece of shareware installed on my drive. I packed up the executable and the source into a zip file, and I posted it to Fidonet. I received some OK feedback, mostly just nitpicking of my c style rather than problems with the code. From the feedback I received I knew my program had made it coast to coast. While following the Grateful Dead on my motorcycle during the summer of 1991, I had an idea for an extension to NUKE. I took a detour on my trip to visit a friend and borrow his computer long enough to create NUKE 2 and post it to Fidonet as well. NUKE 2 came with a bit of documentation bundled. Like the first version, this one generated a small amount of feedback, and I knew that at least a few people around the country knew of it. I received my greatest compliment for NUKE while working at APL. A co-worker asked me how to remove an application from her computer. I flippantly responded with 'Just nuke it.' She then asked me how I knew of NUKE, for it had been a staple utility at her previous employer: a software training company that frequently needed to wipe applications from DOS and Win31 machines. I asked if she had a copy, and then told her to launch it with a '/?', which brought up my copyright statement. Three years and two thousand miles from where I wrote it, I met someone who had used it before they knew me. Wow. By now you should realize the similarities between NUKE and deltree. NUKE existed first. Sure, it was written by a punk kid from Indiana; so why should you believe that Microsoft stole the idea for deltree from a freeware utility that had been distributed with source on Fidonet? Let me answer with a question... Has Microsoft ever had an original idea? If you have ever used nuke, could you write me? I am curious just how far it got before DOS 6 killed it. :) 2003/01/01 - I have now heard from two people from Sweden who used nuke! Care to try it yourself? Download nuke2.zip for the last published version. ps. Do you think they would settle out of court? |